Alfie Templeman’s radiant positivity outshined his jet lag during his concert at The Atlantis on Friday — a spectacle in which he was always in vibrant motion along with his audience.
The 21-year-old Englishman was endlessly energetic for the opening show of the tour, leaping around the stage, joking with the audience and showcasing notable chops on his Fender while exploding into improvised guitar solos.
Templeman has been astonishingly prolific throughout his young career. Chess Club Records signed him at 15, and since then, he has released several EPs and multiple studio albums. His newest project, Radiosoul, came out in June.
Templeman called the album his most coherent project yet, with a variety of influences from funk to indie-pop. His style is both upbeat and introspective, defined by musical fluency and personable lyrics over grooves that range from rock to dance.
He’s skilled on many instruments, but stayed on guitar for the duration of the show, bouncing back and forth from his catchy, alt-rock riffs to screaming guitar solos.
He was having fun, which was abundantly clear for audience members like Grace Chen.
“It’s just very youthful,” she said, “He’s just a couple of months older than most of the fans here.”
But Templeman’s age isn’t indicative of a lack of experience. In fact, the singer-songwriter has been fluent in a variety of instruments since his childhood and developed production skills while self-recording his earliest work.
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Now, he’s grown into an artist who can travel across the Atlantic to meet and record with legendary Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers in Miami, who is featured on “Just a Dance” from Templeman’s newest album.
“We’d record for like 10 hours a day, and half of that we’d just be making jokes,” he recalled. “He told me about how he tried to reunite Simon and Garfunkel and just failed completely.”
Templeman’s time in both Miami and Los Angeles served as a remedy for the writer’s block he experienced last winter. He said the sun energized him, which resulted in him writing more songs.
He also collaborated with producer Dan Carey, which he considered a favorite moment from the creation of the album. He came into the session with a litany of ideas, but Carey encouraged him to start fresh.
“We didn’t really know what we were gonna make,” he said, “And [Carey’s] great with that kind of stuff.”
He’s come a long way from the days of recording by himself on a laptop and burning tracks onto CDs. Templeman now has over 300 million worldwide streams and has received acclaim from both critics and renowned stations like BBC Radio.
But that’s not to say he’s forgotten his roots. Templeman did all the production work himself for some of the songs on Radiosoul, and has a new project in the works that takes him back to the basics.
“I set myself a challenge to try and record a record in a month,” he said. “It weirdly felt like I was going back to my roots, back to 2018, 2019.”
Templeman incorporated songs from his early career, songs from Radiosoul and even previewed an unreleased song during the concert.
Diana Zagorodna, who’s been a fan of Templeman since 2018 and traveled from Richmond for the concert, said Templeman’s music has a profound way of making one’s problems disappear.
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The overwhelming energy of both the show and the music itself is a result of diverse influences.
Growing up, Templeman said he felt displaced from the heavier music scene in his hometown and wanted to bring a more indie vibe to his music. His parents’ music tastes also influenced him and continue to shape his sound today — the funk influence on Radiosoul can be attributed to music his mother used to play in the car, which taught him the importance of melody, he said.
The show sold about 350 tickets, Templeman said. He and his band will travel to California and then Mexico, followed by a longer leg in the United Kingdom and Europe.
Despite his growing status, Templeman stays very down-to-earth and grateful for the fans that came out to support on the opening show of the tour. It felt like going to a friend’s concert for many, likely because of Templeman’s frequent conversations with the audience in which he joked about U.K. weather and announced that he had a Jersey Mike’s sub for lunch.
But there is a pressure to be consistently releasing music, he said.
“I went quiet for like a year and a half, and people were like, ‘Oh, Alfie’s disappeared,’” he said. “That’s kind of why I wanted to put out a project next year as well.”
Templeman hasn’t disappeared. From his start as a talented bedroom musician to headlining a world tour, the young man from Bedfordshire has brought relentless enthusiasm to everything he’s done.
